Present Tense Motivational Quotes

The success of the future does not lie solely on the safety of the past, but relies broadly on the security of the present.

depths of generosity! What a mystery! The key to the mystery lies in another affirmation that appears for the first time here in the writings of the New Testament: Christ’s breathtaking initiative is a manifestation of love. The synoptic Gospels do not make this motivation explicit as Paul does.8 The past tense of “who has loved me” raises the question, Why does Paul not use the present tense and say “the Son of God who loves me” (see Rev 1:5)? The reason is in the connection between “has loved” and “has given himself up.” Paul is referring to the concrete past event in which the Son of God fully manifested his love: his death on the cross.

As with most art thieves, the Gardner burglars didn’t actually care about art. All they did was make the world uglier. Breitwieser’s sole motivation for stealing, he insists, is to surround himself with beauty, to gorge on it. Very few art thieves have ever cited aesthetics as an incentive, but Breitwieser has emphasized this repeatedly, across dozens of hours of media interviews, during which he has not tried to hide his guilt, describing his crimes and emotions with present-tense immediacy and seemingly pinpoint precision.

Before delivering a presentation, a salesperson might ask himself positive outcome questions that sound like this: Am I going to deliver a compelling pitch? Are they likely to buy from me? Will they be satisfied with their purchase? As it turns out, the very act of asking the questions is magical. In their fascinating paper “Motivating Goal-Directed Behavior through Introspective Self-Talk: The Role of the Interrogative Form of Simple Future Tense,” researchers Ibrahim Senay, Dolores Albarracín, and Kenji Noguchi describe the surprising results of a clever experiment they conducted in 2010. Participants were led to believe that the researchers were “interested in people’s handwriting practices” and asked to write one of the following four words or phrases twenty times: “I,” “Will,” “Will I,” or “I will.” Once the writing task was completed, they were given a series of word puzzles to solve. The group that wrote the interrogative phrase “Will I” outperformed all three other groups in the word-puzzles task by nearly double.